James Carroll was given ample space in the Boston Globe to explain his thoughts on the Second Vatican Council. And, fine writer that he is, he recalls with exquisite detail his entry into seminary in the early 1960s. He remembers what he was wearing, he remembers the changes in his routine, he remembers his surprise when a television was brought into the common room of the seminary so that the inmates could watch the opening of the Second Vatican Council.
Then, Carroll clarifies his hermeneutic when he writes of the speech Pope John XXIII delivered on that opening day of the Council in 1962, “The speech was in Latin, and the revolution was still hidden from us. But that day changed everything.” Changed everything? This is the most succinct statement of the hermeneutic of rupture I have yet seen. And, while I value the succinct in certain instances, it is not always of much value to the historian.
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